The Wheat Crop Held at the Elevator

I would have to drive eleven hundred miles back for a hearing in the middle of harvest, with a verbal contract and a man who would say he never agreed to a dollar.

We could call the rest of the family. My mother is eighty. Wayne is her brother-in-law. I was not going to put her in that chair at Christmas.

We could eat it. A lot of crews do. They call it the cost of doing business with relatives.

That was Carla’s first thought, and I could hear it was not what she wanted. She had added up the figures three times.

“It’s not just the money,” she said. “It’s Jesse. It’s Cade seeing it.” “I know.” “What do you have that he wants?” Carla said.

She is a patient woman, and when she gets this way she sounds like a county auditor. “Not what do you want from him. What does he want from you?”

I did not have an answer for a minute. Then I did, and I felt a little sick, because I could see exactly how it would work.

Nobody tells you about the ticket. When a custom crew hauls grain to an elevator, the scale tickets go in the name of whoever’s truck delivered it.

At the end of harvest the farmer signs a slip and the elevator moves the grain over to his account.

Most of the time that is a ten-minute errand at the scale house window, the day after the last field.

The farmer does it because it is his grain and he wants the money. The crew signs because the farmer has paid.

Wayne had been in a hurry the first day. His own trucks were out with a broken axle, and he had told me to haul everything with mine.

He said, “Just run it under the crew’s name, Sid will straighten it out.” I had said sure, because it was easier.

Forty-three thousand bushels of Wayne’s wheat had gone across the Prairie Valley Co-op scale in Lyle on tickets that said Reimer Custom Harvesting, Nolan Reimer, and nothing else.

It was Wayne’s wheat. It was sitting in the co-op’s bins and I could not sell a bushel of it. But I could decline to sign the slip.

Until I signed, Wayne could not sell his crop, or pay the seed and fertilizer account he had been carrying at that very co-op since the winter, or make the note on his equipment that came due the fifteenth of July.

“Call Sid,” Carla said. Sid Brandl managed the Prairie Valley Co-op for thirty-one years.

He had been my father’s best friend since the two of them were in Future Farmers together, and he sat three rows behind us at my father’s service six years ago.

When Dad’s pickup was repossessed in the bad drought of 2012, Sid was the man who loaned him his own for two months and never mentioned it again.

I called him from the motel parking lot at nine at night. “Nolan,” he said. “How’s the run?” “We’re done in Lyle. I need to ask you something about the tickets.”

He listened to the whole thing. I said it as flat as I could. I did not call Wayne a thief, and I did not ask Sid to take a side.

I told him what we had agreed, what Wayne had said, and what the slip was.